Link Customer Focused Competencies to the Power Core

A set of competencies exists in organizations that have learned to develop and deliver customer experiences across the silos.

These customer focus competencies form a chain of actions required to manage the handoffs of the customer experience across the enterprise. They need to become second nature to organizations wanting to become proficient at managing customer relationships and customer profitability.

• Deliver what the customers value
• Integrated customer experience
• Reliability in key customer contacts
• Rewards based on operational metrics
• Clarity in silo hand-offs
• Feedback drives improvement

Each Power Core naturally develops certain skills and pays less attention to others, so the Power Core will have an impact on the ease at which these cross-company customer competencies can be developed and integrated. How swiftly an organization can integrate them correlates to how closely aligned they are to the reinforced Power Core skills.

The distance between where you are now and when you get to wiring in customer focus competencies will depend on how natural this work is to those who drive the power core. The Power Core of your company will likely make some of these competencies easier to develop than others. Some will seem nearly impossible; it may be that the inclination to work this way just doesn’t exist naturally. That’s why it’s critical to figure out how strong the Power Core is in possessing or advocating the customer focus skills sets. You need to know how interested they are in coming to the customer party.

Ask these questions to begin to zero in on knowing what your Power Core is, how natural the customer competencies reside within the Power Core, and the scale of challenge ahead of you for driving customer focus and profitability:

• Where do you drop the ball repeatedly with customers?
• Where are you vulnerable because of your focus on other things?
• Which competencies are considered “optional” or up to the individual zealots to nurture and push in the organization?

Once you begin to understand the true priorities of your organization because of the pull of your company’s Power Core – you can finally determine the best path to follow to weave in the customer.

TAKE ACTION: Assess the Customer Experience Competencies of Your Power Core